OneDrive doesn’t have the option to select folders from multiple disk drives – this wasn’t a problem for other online storage/synchronization tools that I have used previously, however OneDrive wants you to simply selection one “root” folder and it will only included files/folders beneath that.

I have a scenario where I have a 100GB SSD disk for frequently accessed files and a 1TB slower SATA disk for photos and archives. I have files and folders in both drives that I want to be synchronized to the OneDrive “Cloud”.

So to do this I needed to use the Windows command line tool MKLINK to create a symbolic link.

C:\Users\danovich\OneDrive\ <——- “Root” OneDrive folder, located on the 100GB SSD driveD:\Data\Photos\ <——- Photos folder, located on the 1TB SATA drive, containing 500GB of photos I want to be sync’d into OneDrive

Data will now be syncing with OneDrive and the “Photos” symbolic link, essentially a shortcut, will appear in the OneDrive folder:

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Do you have a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) from a device with which you need to create a certificate from a Microsoft Windows Certificate Authority? This is actually pretty straight forward. On a domain machine, launch a command prompt and save the CSR into a file on that machine (CSR.REQ in the example below). Then just use the command:

Last week I passed the ISACA Certified Information Security Manager (CISM) exam, and thought I could share some information on the resources I used to study:

Two months before the exam, I started to listen to and watch the Cybrary CISM training course videos. About 8 hours of content all up, these were fantastic to listen to on the train or while driving to work. Well presented, good coverage of the material and also free – although I did end up making a donation. Download the app or use the website – https://www.cybrary.it/course/cism/

CISM Review Manual 15th Edition – fantastic study guide covering the content in great detail. Well laid out so you can quickly find sections and terms that you want to focus in on.

CISM Review Questions, Answers & Explanations Manual 9th Edition – well worth spending the time to go through some practice questions to prepare yourself for the formatting of the questions. Again I used this to work out areas I needed to focus on.

All the study in the world doesn’t replace experience, I’d been lucky enough to have been applying most of this content in my day-to-day job already, so I didn’t find the exam too far removed from decisions I’d make on a daily basis.

The last 3 sources are slightly dated as they talk about the 10 domains (as opposed to the new 8 domains) however I found the content was still relevant.

The exam, 6 hours and 250 questions long, requires real life work experience across all facets of IT – without this experience there is no chance of understanding the concepts and subsequently no chance of being able to answer questions on the extremely wide variety of topics.

As you may know, the current iteration of MCSE certifications require recertification every 3 years. For the Private Cloud stream, this requires an exam – 70-981. I sat and passed this today.

Something that seems not to be published widely is that you can recertify some MSCE streams without sitting an exam – from https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/learning/certification-exam-policies.aspx

Q. Is it possible to fulfil the requirement without taking a recertification exam
A. Yes. Candidates can now get recertified by taking a series of courses with Microsoft Virtual Academy. Read the list of available certifications, required courses and additional details to get recertified through Microsoft Virtual Academy.

Preparation for the exam is difficult – there are no study guides or reference material – you are just ‘expected to know’.

My observation is that it is basically a mix of the 70-246 and 70-247 exams, not really any new material – pretty disappointing, some of the questions seemed familiar so I wouldn’t be surprised if the exam content has just been reused. The main areas covered are:

System Center Operations Manager

System Center Service Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

System Center Orchestrator

System Center Data Protection Manager

System Center App Controller

System Center Configuration Manager

Azure portal

Would I sit this again? Probably not. While I’m sure the intention for recertification is well placed, it just seems like a money-grab – $206AU for the exam fee. There are no benefits to me as an IT professional apart from keeping the certification active – I haven’t learnt any new skills or gained any additional knowledge – I’ve basically sat the same exam that I sat 3 years ago and in that time there has been significant change to the System Center and Azure offerings but this wasn’t reflected in the exam.

I had a scenario where I needed to upgrade from Windows 8.1 Enterprise to Windows 10 Professional using the free Microsoft upgrade via Windows Update. The free update usually doesn’t work on Enterprise versions of Windows 8.1. To get this to work:

Open a command prompt with Administrator rights and run 4 commands to update the registry: